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While becoming a parent is often joyful, it can also be a time of great stress and uncertainty.

Music therapy can help decrease new parents' anxiety and improve their emotional coping.

Music therapy can also increase new parents' positive experiences, boosting positivity and kindness.

Becoming a parent is one of life’s great joys. However, experiencing pregnancy, regardless of outcome, can be accompanied by high levels of stress, fear, and uncertainties revolving around the well-being of the parents and the infant. This is where music therapy comes in.

A recent observational research study suggests that music therapy can decrease stress and anxiety, helping parents cope with emotions, feel stronger, and be distracted from stress, particularly during stays in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Music has a healing power that goes beyond comfort, offering stress reduction for parents who are on the journey of parenthood.

Observing Music Therapy’s Impact on Perinatal Mental Health

“The Effect of Music Therapy on Perceived Parental Stress in Perinatal Care,” a 2022 exploratory study, evaluated how music therapy can help parents navigate the stress of perinatal care. Throughout the study, music therapists offered services to all newly admitted parents in the maternity ward and NICU each week.

Sessions involved an integration of developmentally appropriate relaxation-focused music for both parents in the maternity unit and the NICU. Common interventions used include parent psychoeducation, songwriting, music and feeding, music-assisted relaxation, and playlist creation.

The Study and Methodology

While vast research has focused on the benefits of music on infant development, this study sought to explore its role in impacting parents’ needs and experiences. It examined how music therapy can impact the stress levels of inpatient perinatal parents, with a main goal of providing non-pharmacological, music-based coping strategies to minimize parent stress levels throughout the perinatal journey.

Parental stress related to music therapy sessions was evaluated using anonymous, voluntary surveys administered in-person, which included the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) to measure overall stress from admission to discharge and the Stress Numeric Rating Scale (SNRS-11) to assess immediate stress levels before and after each session. Optional qualitative feedback was also collected at discharge to capture parents’ written reflections on the overall music therapy session.

The study featured 77 music therapy sessions, and findings include:

After only one (1) music therapy session, parents in both antepartum and NICU settings reported a 50 percent reduction in their self-rated stress scores on the SNRS-11.

Qualitative results measured by the PSS post survey reflected a unanimous feeling of support and relaxation felt amongst parents in NICU and maternity units. Parents reported increasing their use of music in their daily routines because of receiving music therapy during their inpatient stay.

During the PSS post survey, parents expressed that music therapy helped them better cope with emotions, feel stronger, be distracted from stress, and experience positivity and kindness.

Findings support existing literature regarding music therapy as a stress management tool for the parents of newborns in the NICU, as well as serving as a suggestion to leverage music therapy to support parents’ stress management during perinatal hospitalization.

Music therapy can be an effective way to simultaneously impact parent health outcomes along with infant outcomes by way of parent stress reduction.

This study underscores the power of music therapy to help parents, not just in-hospital patients. When parents are stressed, nervous, or overwhelmed, it can negatively affect not only their personal well-being but also how they care for and connect with their infant.

Moving forward, music therapy offers an avenue toward reducing parental stress. Stress management is a powerful mental health support strategy that can impact health outcomes through improving interactions between parents and baby, strengthening bonding, and contributing to a calmer environment for healing. Supporting parents through music therapy is a powerful step toward advancing perinatal mental health care.

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Jenna Bollard-Marcovitz, Raffi Tachdjian, Esteban Roa, Luisa Flores, Scott Brown, Amira Gill, Chelsea Brown, Eiress Wicks, Hranush Danelyan, Mint Tan, Grace Pak, Bethany Pincus, Julia Petrey-Juarez, The Effect of Music Therapy on Perceived Parental Stress in Perinatal Care: An Exploratory Study, Music Therapy Perspectives, Volume 40, Issue 1, Spring 2022, Pages 68–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/mtp/miab016

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